Gitomer: A Twitter webinar firestorm

I did my first big Twitter group tweet earlier this month. It’s called a “tweet cast.”

Three companies – Adly (adly.com), Evolve Inc. (evolvesinc.com) and KiteDesk (KiteDesk.com) – combined resources and invited 22 experts, including me, to tweet the answers to eight questions as they were posted. The result was a firestorm of tweets, retweets and assorted comments.

In short, it was an overwhelming success. Hundreds of tweets per minute, and value messages flying all over Twitter-space.

KiteDesk, Evolve and a few others were both sponsors and responsible for the platform, the communications, the experts and creating a set of questions for us to reference and tweet our answers to.

Below are the questions and my replies:.

Q: Isn’t spending too much time on social media dangerous? I’d rather my team sell vs. tweet.• Spend as much time on social selling as you do watching some dumb TV show.• Allocate time, don’t spend it - at least an hour a day to build your social net-worth.• All customers are looking for value, why not communicate with all of them at once? • Anyone who does not allocate at least an hour a day communicating value messages to your customers is a fool.

Q: Give me real examples of situations where social selling produced results. Better yet, tell me how social selling has produced results that would not have been possible without it (company name, campaign, outcome, etc).
• NOTE WELL: Just because you are ready to sell does not mean they are ready to buy.• Value messages not sales messages, will ultimately create buyers. • Wanna meet more valuable people on social selling networks? Offer more valuable messages!

Q: How do best-in-class companies measure and manage social selling results?• Apple doesn’t measure - how are they doing? Microsoft does - how are they doing?• Apple doesn’t measure - how are they doing? BlackBerry does - how are they doing? • Measuring results of social media and social sales is a total waste of time - just do it!

Q: How do I get my team to change their behavior to incorporate social selling?• Marketing: Solicit testimonial videos and real-life examples that can be posted on Facebook and YouTube.• Marketing: Provide your team with a full suite of messages and things to say to their customers. • Marketing: Provide your team with a full suite of social selling templates.

Q: What is marketing’s role in social selling and how can the two departments work together to produce results?• The best role for marketing is to get all their salespeople up and running on social media and social selling. • The best role for marketing is to prepare all salespeople with a full suite of social selling tools.• As a customer, I don’t want a sales message; I want to value message. Do you get that, marketing?• The best role for marketing in social media is to stay out of it.

Q: Are there holes in the social sales toolbox? If so, what’s missing?• It’s not just social sales, it’s social service. How good are you at social listening? • Missing from 99% of all social selling messages: a value message to the prospective buyer.

Take a close look at my answers. Some I prepared in advance; some I created on the spot.

RESULTS: I was retweeted and “favorited” more than 250 times during this event, I gained more than 100 new Twitter followers, and I learned some very valuable lessons about the attraction of this type of promotion.